In this work, we propose a routing protocol based on topologies for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (HSN) named as RouT. The proposed protocol creates different logical topologies considering the same physical topology of a HSN. The heterogeneous network has two types of sensors nodes, called L-sensors and H-sensors. The L-sensors are nodes with Low hardware capabilities where the H-sensors are sensors with High hardware capabilities. The RouT protocol creates different logical topologies and each topology considers a different number of links among H-sensors. In this way, each topology has its tradeoff between energy consumption and latency during data communication. Simulation results showed that the RouT protocol is able to provide different topologies that can be used if the network application has different requirements. © 2012 IEEE.124812817Al-Karaki, J., Kamal, A., Routing techniques in wireless sensor networks: A survey (2004) Wireless Communications IEEE, 11 (6), pp. 6-28Boukerche, A., Fei, X., A coverage-preserving scheme for wireless sensor network with irregular sensing range (2007) Ad Hoc Networks, 5 (8), pp. 1303-1316. , DOI 10.1016/j.adhoc.2007.02.020, PII S1570870507000455Wightman, P.M., Labrador, M.A., Topology maintenance: Extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks," in (2010) IEEE Latin America Transactions, 8 (4), pp. 469-475Filho, D.F.L., Amazonas, J.R., Tcnet: Trellis coded network-implementation of qos-aware routing protocols in wsns," in (2013) IEEE Latin America Transactions, 11 (3), pp. 969-975Boukerche, A., Das, S.K., Fabbri, A., Swimnet: A scalable parallel simulation testbed for wireless and mobile networks (2001) Wireless Networks, 7 (5), pp. 467-489Duarte-Melo, E., Liu, M., Analysis of energy consumption and lifetime of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (2002) IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, pp. 21-25Guilherme, M., Guidoni, D.L., Aquino, A.L.L., Loureiro, A.A.F., Improving and over-The-Air programming protocol for wireless sensor networks based on small world concepts (2009) 12th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, pp. 261-276Gracioli, G., Frohlich, A.A., Pires, R.P., Wanner, L., Evaluation of an rssi-based location algorithm for wireless sensor networks," in IEEE Latin America Transactions, 9 (1), pp. 96-101Yarvis, M., Kushalnagar, N., Singh, H., Rangarajan, A., Liu, Y., Singh, S., Exploiting heterogeneity in sensor networks (2005) Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM, 2, pp. 878-890. , Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM 2005. The Conference on Computer Communications - 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications SocietiesNoori, M., Ardakani, M., Design of heterogeneous sensor networks with lifetime and coverage considerations (2012) Wireless Communications Letters, 1 (3), pp. 193-196Tandon, R., Nandi, S., Crp: Cluster head re-election protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (2013) International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, pp. 1-10Gupta, P., Kumar, P., The capacity of wireless networks (2000) IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 46 (2), pp. 388-404Halder, S., Dasbit, S., A lifetime enhancing node deployment strategy using heterogeneous nodes in wsns for coal mine monitoring (2012) 15th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, pp. 117-124Sevgi, C., Kocyigit, A., On determining cluster size of randomly deployed heterogeneous wsns (2008) Communications Letters, 12 (4), pp. 232-234Luo, H., Ye, F., Cheng, J., Lu, S., Zhang, L., TTDD: Two-tier data dissemination in large-scale wireless sensor networks (2005) Wireless Networks, 11 (1-2), pp. 161-175. , DOI 10.1007/s11276-004-4753-xGuidoni, D., Boukerche, A., Villas, L., Souza, F., Mini, R., Loureiro, A., A framework based on small world features to design hsns topologies with qos (2012) IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications, pp. 732-737Lin, H., Rushing, J., Graves, S., Criswell, E., A data fusion algorithm for large heterogeneous sensor networks (2007) International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems and Applications, pp. 225-232Kumar, D., Aseri, T., Patel, R.B., A two tier data aggregation and clustering scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks (2009) IEEE International Advance Computing Conference, pp. 841-846Sinha, A., Lobiyal, D., Performance analysis of data aggregation for overlapping clusters in heterogeneous sensor network (2013) International Conference on Contemporary Computing, pp. 143-148Sinha, A., Lobiyal, D., (2014) The Network Simulator ns-2, , http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/nsBoukerche, A., Xin, F., A Voronoi approach for coverage protocols in wireless sensor networks (2007) GLOBECOM - IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, pp. 5190-5194. , DOI 10.1109/GLOCOM.2007.984, 4411894, IEEE GLOBECOM 2007 - 2007 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, Proceedings